The AAS has provided below a forum for individual seeking assistance in connection with submitting a session proposal.

How to use the forum:

If you have a session you would like to propose and need a few more individual to participate - click the Sessions Organizers seeking Participants forum. Next, click 'Add a Topic' or reply to a posted topic

If you are an individual and would like to participate on a session in Washington, D.C. but do not have enough contacts to form a session proposal, click Participants Seeking Sessions. Next, click 'Add a Topic' or reply to a posted topic.

Please make sure to include the following information:

Your name, affiliation and how you would like to be contacted.

The topic of your proposed session or the topic of your paper

The geographic area of study that best represents this topic

Important note for anyone using this forum. Posting session or paper information here is not a substitution to submitting a formal proposal using the online application form. It is your responsibility to make sure the organizer of a session receives the information requested and/or your responsibility to ensure the information is submitted in a timely manner.

I am a Phd candidate at the University of Oxford. My thesis looks into colonial literature written by the French about Indochina and their imperial literary culture from 1880s to 1920s. I am using historicist approach to examine the French construction of the Indochinese other and its political and aesthetic implications by focusing on Decadent thematics and aesthetics such as opium, sexuality and spirituality (particularly esotericism).

My paper for this conference is entitled ‘Reinventing Alternative Modern Masculinity Through Indigenous Androgyny in Fin de Siècle French Colonial Literature of Indochina: The Case of Albert de Pouvourville (1861-1939)’ (see the abstract below)

I am interested in participating in panels that look into the questions of gender, race and Empire, and/or Colonialism, Orientalism, Post-Colonialism, and/or South-East Asian literature, or any related topics that might focus on broader cross-cultural/transnational exchange.

‘Reinventing Alternative Modern Masculinity Through Indigenous Androgyny in Fin de Siècle French Colonial Literature of Indochina: The Case of Albert de Pouvourville (1861-1939)’

The effeminate male colonised has largely been explored by critics of the Empire as one of the foundational tropes constitutive of colonial discourse and political domination of non-European people. In this paper, I shall examine one of the most acclaimed, yet forgotten, novels of fin de siècle French Indochina, L’Annam sanglant (1890). Using a historicist and materialist approach along with textual analysis, I argue for a counter-narrative reading of this novel, not so much vis à vis colonialism as from the gender terms. Written by the well-respected Orientalist and colonial administrator, Albert-Eugène de Pouvourville, this novel proposes a rewriting of the crucial 1883 episode of the French conquest of Tonkin against the indigenous army led by the Chinese ‘Black Flag’ leader from an unusual point of view of the native. The topos of male androgyny played out around the effeminate Chinese sage-warrior is informed by the Decadent aesthetics at vogue among avant-garde Parisian artistic circle, depicting the military milieu in pervasive homoerotic overtones. However, through an unexpected association of martial heroism with Oriental esotericism, I contend that Pouvourville not only responses to the perceived national crisis of manhood preoccupying France more than any other European nations, but he also reinvents an alternative model of ‘modern masculinity,’ ‘deprovincialising’ Western heteronormative binarism.